It is not entirely clear why the College of Lucidity held me so long in such brutal conditions, hobbled and yoked, save to break my will so I should no longer attempt to flee even this scene of desolation. I know not what further scheme they would have enacted upon my already distracted frame had events not transpired which changed considerably the issue of this incarceration.

As it occurred, I was told by one of the Irish boys who they had, it appears, hired in my absence, that in the afternoon they would see me and speak with me about my future in the house; and that I should prepare for this interview.

How might one prepare, locked in most complete immobility? I prepared only through the gathering of rage. I thought on their hypocrisy, too easy a mark, even, for argument, so howling it was — that I had been apprehended as slave through the capitulation of those who fought for liberty.

I thought of the deaths of those slaves who fought in other men’s steads; I thought on Hosiah Lister, whoever he had been, who tasted only the freedom of negation; whose dark body received the death meant for his master, the scripted wound, as if he were the doom-shadow of that man, divided through some blasphemous design from the white man’s body so the death might die and the man live on.

There, where I saw them, toiling in lines, the bonded, they were like ranks of white men’s deaths, substitutes, the shadow that was to come upon a master, waiting to take the contagion within them, or the bullet, the blow, or the final cut.

The Latin for “slave”— servus — as rendered in English literally is “the spared one”; slaves being those taken prisoner in battle, who should, therefore, by all the rules of engagement, have been slain. In antiquity, slaves possessed no rights as citizens because, though spared, they were accounted dead, and as the dead, could not be admitted as living men; and so, for generations, the dead toiled and bred in Rome; the dead taught Rome’s children the secrets of philosophy; the dead built Rome’s great monuments and tombs; until the Romans themselves joined the dead, and all that remained were tombs, and monuments, and half-remembered terms.

So were too these men I worked beside: transformed against their will into the dead; and asked to die again so that they might be free.

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec’d his freedom.

Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us; consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all causality, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still.

This it was that Hosiah Lister had found.

I thought on this, lying in my shackles. Thus, my anger mounting, I awaited my interview.

I waited but a few hours. The Irish boy appeared again, helped me to my feet, and led me shuffling forward.

“They will see you now,” he said.